Chapter XVIII: Book THE FOURTH (6)

As he advanced in life he grew exceedingly tedious, especially upon all that related to himself; so that contrary to the usual course of things, the peculiarities and egotism which had been in some degree pardoned to his genius and youth, _when poor_ became quite intolerable, and were, in fact, not tolerated in society when he succeeded to a large property in Jamaica. He went thither, and was nearly as prolix in his exhortations to his negroes as in his reports of their condition and treatment. It is but just to add he very earnestly endeavoured to the best of his judgment to improve the latter. He died on board ship in his return from his second visit to Jamaica. His obstinacy and paradox may be said to have brought him to that untimely end; for he persisted, against the prohibition of the only medical man in the vessel, to take emetics for sea sickness, and, weakened as he had been by a previous fever on shore, actually died of inanition and exhaustion.

The poetry, plays, and essays of a herd of male and female followers, of whom Dr. Darwin[413] was the chief, though in character and taste very different from Lewis’, had a similar tendency to reconcile men’s minds to approaching changes and to shake the received manner of thinking on religion and politics. Darwin himself, though a versifier rather than a poet, was a remarkable man. His medical practice, singular and startling, was not unsuccessful. His fame in Derbyshire and the adjacent counties was extensive, and not confined to the ignorant or the credulous. With an unwieldy person, uncouth manner, and large tongue, his appearance and conversation captivated strangers, and his more solid qualities attached a numerous body of friends. He was surrounded by admiring disciples. They imbibed, together with a taste for minute and curious observation in physical philosophy, great intrepidity in the search of truth, and not less zeal in diffusing it.

In London there had started up, soon after the French Revolution, a yet more fearless sect, who, mingling the dogmas of materialism with certain visionary notions of the perfectibility of the human species, assailed without disguise all the received opinions upon which the duties of individuals or the institutions of the State had been hitherto founded or defended. These doctrines were not confined to metaphysical works; they were purposely and studiously insinuated in novels, plays, and productions of imagination.

Mr. Godwin[414] was in some sense the father of that school. If known at all to posterity, it will in all probability be as the writer of _Caleb Williams_, not as the author of _Political Justice_, which is already nearly forgotten. He was himself a strange compound of simplicity and of design, of talent and of folly. He plotted against the whole frame of society, but was the easy dupe of his own affections or the professions of his pupils. After a short season of equivocal celebrity, he sank into a hacking writer and concealed partner of the booksellers. The good little books in which our masters and misses were taught the rudiments of profane and sacred history, under the name of Baldwin, were really the composition of Godwin, branded as an atheist by those who unwittingly purchased, recommended, and taught his elementary lessons. Lord Grey (I write in 1834) has recently, by an act of good-nature, relieved this man of genius from penury and drudgery, and bestowed on him some small place under Government.

The strange and disgusting story of his marriage with Mrs. Wollstonecraft, together with the adventures and death of that wild but extraordinary woman, is in print and accessible to all the world. Soon after her death Godwin consulted Curran[415] about marrying again, and Curran warned him against making youth and beauty the chief object, and earnestly exhorted him to select a “_woman with something_.” Curran, on his return from Ireland some years afterwards, visited his friend, and found that he had married a widow. “Well, and has she anything?” was his first question. “Aye, indeed has she!” replied Godwin. “She has eight children!”

Holcroft,[416] one of his least successful disciples, though cursed with the vice of mediocrity which, even in his plays, novels, or travels, a love of paradox could not animate, has left one book which is a great exception to such a censure, and of a nature to render all further notice of him unnecessary. This is his own life—the most curious picture of self-education in an authentic shape which our language possesses. It affords abundant proof of the enjoyment which an access of knowledge can afford to the humblest orders of society, and is a practical exposure of the error as well as selfishness of that philosophy which would confine it to the opulent. This Holcroft was one of the reformers singled out for prosecution and punishment by the proceedings of 1794. He married, I believe, the widow of Mercier, author of the _Tableau de Paris_, and their daughter married Mr. Kenney,[417] an author of some interesting melodramas and lively farces.

There was at the period of which I am now speaking another knot of yet younger enthusiasts. They were soon afterwards generally designated by the name of “the Lake Poets,” because several of them settled in the romantic districts of Cumberland and Westmoreland. They were, at their outset, scarcely less extravagant in their principles, and much more so in their projects, than the materialists of Godwin’s school, though they had the good-fortune to escape all legal persecution. Southey, the destined champion of the Church and Poet Laureate of three successive Sovereigns; Wordsworth, in time the _protégé_ and supporter of Toryism in the North and the pattern, in the judgment of many, of purity both in language and thought; Coleridge, the hireling of every illiberal publication in its turn—were one and all, together with a host of young comrades and admirers, smitten with visionary notions of impracticable liberty, busy in translating or imitating the mystic philosophy and poetry of the Germans, and actually preparing to colonise on the Back Settlements of America for the purpose of establishing an entire exemption from all religious restraints or ceremonies, an equal division of property, and a community of wives. The press, in the meanwhile, teemed with their productions, all inculcating the wildest maxims of German metaphysics, and all combating the principles upon which the institutions of property, as well as the distribution of political power, are founded in society. They escaped, as I have observed, the Crown Lawyer’s prosecutions, but they fell under the more appropriate lash of the ridicule of _The Anti-Jacobin_.[418] The Sapphics of Southey were parodied in a poem entitled _The Needy Knife-grinder_, and Mr. Frere and his coadjutors in their happiest vein exposed the sickly sentimentality and real immorality of the whole school, in a supposed German play, which combined nearly all their absurdities.

Mr. Southey[419] was the nephew of Mr. Hill, long chaplain to the factory at Lisbon, and afterwards rector of Streatham. In one of his visits to England he found his nephew, scarce twenty years of age, on the eve of marrying a girl without a halfpenny. To rescue him from such imprudence his uncle offered to take him through Spain to Portugal for a year, in the hopes that absence might cool his passion. Southey accepted the proposal; but, to defeat the real object of it, he secretly married the very day before he set off on his travels. The tour was not only gratis, but lucrative to him, for the sale of his lively and flippant account of it replenished his purse, and he embarked on a career of authorship and politics which, though desultory and tortuous, has always been directed to some profitable haven or another. His habits were those of an author by trade. Stated hours set apart for his various studies. Poetry and prose, divinity and wit, had each their distinct periods of each day allotted to them. His handwriting was wonderfully neat, minute, and legible, and he told me that he saved no inconsiderable sum each year by this accomplishment, so numerous were his writings.

His vanity was inoffensive and diverting, and his enthusiasm, real or affected, about his literary pursuits pleasant and amiable. His confidence in his own powers was, indeed, preposterous, and his appetite for flattery, of which his family and friends served him with a constant and plentiful supply, was inordinate; yet, in spite of research and ardour, a sprightly imagination, and great raciness and accuracy in his English, he was not only a credulous and almost silly historian, but a weak reasoner and tiresome poet, and neither in prose nor in verse captivated or warmed his reader, though he might occasionally divert and surprise him. His egotism was excessive. He would fain have been arrogant; but his scorn and indignation, in spite of himself, assumed the character of flippancy and impertinence rather than of insolence or pride.

He was a schoolfellow and friend of Mr. Charles W. Wynne, and that gentleman procured him some small favour or pension in 1806. The touch of Treasury gold seems to have entirely altered the character of the man. From that time forth all his predilections have been for power, and, in its most odious form, exclusion and monopoly; and, what was yet more strange, most of his associates have accompanied him in this sudden and violent apostasy from his early principles. Possibly some little resentment, mingled with self-interest, deepened the tinge which he and the other Lake poets received soon after Mr. Perceval’s accession to power. _The Edinburgh Review_ had censured the peculiarities of Southey’s and Wordsworth’s school. The sentence of that popular but stern tribunal of literature was sensibly felt in the sale of the works. Southey openly lamented that a man like Jeffrey,[420] who, in his self-complacency, he said, “in physical stature did not reach his shoulder, nor in intellectual dimensions his ankle,” should yet have it in his power to kick away the harvest due to his industry and genius. _The Edinburgh Review_ had, during the first years of its publication, acted up to the stern maxim adopted for its motto,

Cum nocens absolvitur judex damnatur.

But surely it may be doubted whether the mortification and exposure of sundry pretenders to literary merit does as much service to the republic of letters as the lavish use of ridicule and invective does mischief, by deterring many modest but ingenious men from encountering their strictures.[421]

That formidable journal first appeared in 1802. The notion of it was suggested, in a small lodging or flat up four pair of stairs, by Sydney Smith to Mr. Jeffrey, Lord Webb Seymour, Mr. Horner, Mr. T. Thomson, and, I think, Mr. John Murray. Sydney proposed, with allusion to the diet of the country, to assume for their motto,

Musam meditamur avena,[422]

“We study the Muses on oatmeal”: a suggestion which he says his Northern coadjutors vociferously rejected, though no bad specimen of the playful humour with which he enlivened some one article of every number for several years. Brougham was not one of the original projectors; Sydney Smith objected to his admission. His contributions, he said, would be too long, too many, and too political. Those of Sydney himself, often devoted to the exposure and ridicule of bad sermons and theological works, were ignorantly cited by parsons in England as singular proofs of the acrimony which still distinguished the Kirk of Scotland, and led them to satirise the writers of an Episcopal Church. Brougham, when admitted, verified one portion of Sydney’s prediction. He overwhelmed the review with politics; but few of his fellow-labourers were by that time disposed to lament such an innovation, and the increasing sale produced by the introduction of such topics might have reconciled them to the change, had they retained more scruples about it.

An article upon Cobbett and the public journals, undertaken some eight or ten years after the commencement of the _Review_, and against the better judgment of Mr. Horner, by Mr. Jeffrey, at the suggestion of Brougham, stamped its character as a political publication irrevocably. Till then several persons quite unconnected with politics, and some absolutely adverse to the Whigs, had occasionally contributed papers—Wilberforce, Walter Scott, Richard Payne Knight,[423] Mr. Bartholomew Frere,[424] and many others. The number of the contributors, the facility with which contributions were admitted, and the secrecy often enjoined and generally observed, led to many false conjectures, and those conjectures to consequences, literary and political, that had influence on the opinions and conduct of individuals.

Cobbett exhibited a proof that demagogues, like Princes, when they act on bare suspicion, lose their sagacity. He was nettled at the unexpected exposure of his shameless tergiversation on the article above alluded to; he accordingly directed all his resentment against Mr. Horner, who was the only reviewer that had earnestly protested against it.[425]

Lord Strangford imagined that a severe stricture on his poetry,[426] written, in truth, by a fellow diplomat of anti-Jacobin and Tory propensities, was composed or instigated by me; and though assiduous enough in his correspondence with me while the Grenville Administration lasted, he scarcely concealed his resentment to me—and to all Whigs, soon afterwards. A more important personage, Lord Byron himself, was swayed in his conduct for some time from a misconception that the flippant review of his first poems, written, in truth, by Mr. Brougham, was the composition of George Lamb[427] at my instigation, whereas I never saw the poems, nor did I know of the existence of the author (for I thought the title extinct) till I read the review and expressed to some of the reviewers my surprise and regret at the unmerited and bitter severity of the article.[428]

Lord Strangford had not been less severely handled, but he had deserved it by the personal conceit of his egotism and the great infidelity of his translations. Invention, however, is more pardonable in a poem, and even a translation, than in an official letter. His verses from the Portuguese are creditable to his taste and ear, though they represent Camoëns as unfaithfully as his dispatches the events on the Tagus or the communications of the Sublime Porte. He has not, perhaps, met with the success he had reason to expect as an author or an orator. His facility in composing verse and prose is considerable, and his inferiority as a speaker, though undeniable, proceeds from no deficiency in utterance, language, or logic.

In London his acquaintance has never been much courted, either in literary or fashionable society, nor his conversation, though not wanting in knowledge, vivacity, or good breeding, much relished. His father had been expelled, by a very unusual Act of Parliament, from the Irish House of Lords, for a corrupt vote in a judicial proceeding. At his entrance in life, moreover, the disadvantage of that recollection was aggravated by extreme poverty, and there was nothing to counterbalance it but distant relationship with the Percies and Lord Egremont. To the latter, I believe, he was chiefly indebted for his first employment under Government, and to both, for the education which rendered him capable of discharging it. Success in his diplomatic career entitles him to a niche in the political rather than literary monuments of the day; but as he will not appear in any of my raising in that department to much advantage, it is fair to observe here that he dedicated the gains of the profession he embraced, in the first instance, to his mother and sisters, and showed in that particular a kindness of heart and a liberality of conduct which I much fear will not easily be inferred from other passages of his life.

APPENDIX